From about A.D. 500 onward, it was thought no hardship to lie on the floor at night, or on a hard bench above low drafts, damp earth, and rats. To be indoors was luxury enough. Nor was it distasteful to sleep huddled closely together in company, for warmth was valued above privacy. And, too, in those lawless times, safety was to be found in numbers.
Straw stuffed into a coarse cloth sack could be spread on a table or bench by a guest in a home or an inn, to “make a bed.” And since straw was routinely removed to dry out, or to serve a daytime function, beds were made and remade.
The downward slide of beds and bedroom comfort is reflected in another term from the Middle Ages: bedstead. Today the word describes a bed’s framework for supporting a mattress. But to the austere-living Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, a bedstead was merely the location on the floor where a person bedded down for the night.
Hardship can be subtly incorporated into custom. And throughout the British Isles, the absence of comfortable beds was eventually viewed as a plus, a nightly means of strengthening character and body through travail. Soft beds were thought to make soft soldiers. That belief was expressed by Edgar, king of the Scots, at the start of the 1100s. He forbade noblemen, who could afford comfortable down mattresses, to sleep on any soft surface that would pamper them to effeminacy and weakness of character. Even undressing for bed (except for the removal of a suit of mail armor) was viewed as a coddling affectation. So harshly austere was Anglo-Saxon life that the conquering Normans regarded their captives as only slightly more civilized than animals.
Spring Mattress: Late 18th Century, England
Mattresses once were more nightmarish, in the bugs and molds they harbored, than a sleeper’s worst dreams. Straw, leaves, pine needles, and reeds—all organic stuffings—mildewed and rotted and nurtured bedbugs. Numerous medieval accounts tell of mice and rats, with the prey they captured, nesting in mattresses not regularly dried out and restuffed. Leonardo da Vinci, in the fifteenth century, complained of having to spend the night “upon the spoils of dead creatures” in a friend’s home. Physicians recommended adding such animal repellents as garlic to mattress stuffing.
Until the use of springs and inorganic stuffings, the quest for a comfortable, critter-free mattress was unending. Indeed, as we’ve seen, one reason to “make a bed” anew each day was to air and dry out the mattress stuffing.
Between da Vinci’s time and the birth of the spring mattress in the eighteenth century, numerous attempts were made to get a comfortable, itch-free night’s repose. Most notable perhaps was the 1500s French air mattress. Known as a “wind bed,” the mattress was constructed of heavily waxed canvas and equipped with air valves for inflation by mouth or mechanical pump. The brainchild of upholsterer William Dujardin, history’s first air mattress enjoyed a brief popularity among the French nobility of the period, but cracking from repeated or robust use severely shortened its lifetime. A number of air beds made from more flexible oilcloth were available in London in the seventeenth century, and in Ben Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist, a character states his preference for air over straw, declaring, “I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed.”
Adjustable sick bed, incorporating a chamber pot.
British patents for springs—in furniture and carriage seats—began to appear in the early eighteenth century. They were decidedly uncomfortable at first. Being perfectly cylindrical (as opposed to conical), springs when sat upon snaked to one side rather than compressing vertically; or they turned completely on their sides. And given the poor metallurgical standards of the day, springs might snap, poking hazardously through a cushion.
Spring mattresses were attempted. But they presented complex technological problems since a reclining body offers different compressions along its length. Springs sturdy enough to support the hips, for instance, were unyielding to the head, while a spring made sensitive for the head was crushed under the weight of the hips.
By the mid-1850s, the conical innerspring began to appear in furniture seats. The larger circumference of its base ensured a more stable vertical compression. An early mention of sleeping on conical innersprings appeared in an 1870s London newspaper: “Strange as it may seem, springs can be used as an excellent sleeping arrangement with only a folded blanket above the wires.” The newspaper account emphasized spring comfort: “The surface is as sensitive as water, yielding to every pressure and resuming its shape as soon as the body is removed.”
Early innerspring mattresses were handcrafted and expensive. One of the first patented in America, by an inventor from Poughkeepsie, New York, was too costly to arouse interest from any United States bedding manufacturer. For many years, innerspring-mattress beds were found chiefly in luxury hotels and in ocean liners such as the Mauretania, Lusitania, and Titanic. As late as 1925, when U.S. manufacturer Zalmon Simmons conceived of his “Beautyrest” innerspring mattress, its $39.50 price tag was more than twice what Americans paid for the best hair-stuffed mattress of the day.
Simmons, however, cleverly decided not to sell just a mattress but to sell sleep— “scientific sleep,” at that. Beautyrest advertisements featured such creative geniuses of the era as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, H. G. Wells, and Guglielmo Marconi. The company promoted “scientific sleep” by informing the public of the latest findings in the relatively new field of sleep research: “People do not sleep like logs; they move and turn from twenty-two to forty-five times a night to rest one set of muscles and then another.”
With several of the most creative minds of the day stressing how they benefited from a good night’s sleep, it is not surprising that by 1929, Beautyrest, the country’s first popular innerspring mattress, had annual sales of nine million dollars. Stuffed mattresses were being discarded faster than trashmen could collect them.
Electric Blanket: 1930s, United States
Man’s earliest blankets were animal skins, or “choice fleeces,” as they are referred to in the Odyssey. But our word “blanket” derives from a later date and a different kind of bed covering. French bed linens (and bedclothes) during the Middle Ages consisted largely of undyed woolen cloth, white in color and called blanquette, from blanc, meaning “white.” In time, the word evolved to “blanket” and it was used solely for the uppermost bed covering.
The first substantive advance in blankets from choice fleeces occurred in this century and as a spinoff from a medical application of electricity. In 1912, while large areas of the country were still being wired for electric power, American inventor S. I. Russell patented an electric heating pad to warm the chests of tubercular sanitarium patients reclining outdoors. It was a relatively small square of fabric with insulated heating coils wired throughout, and it cost a staggering $150.
Almost immediately, the possibility for larger, bed-sized electric blankets was appreciated; and not only for the ailing. But cost, technology, and safety were obstacles until the mid-1930s. The safety of electric blankets remained an issue for many years. In fact, most refinements to date involved generating consistent heat without risking fire. One early advance involved surrounding heating elements with nonflammable plastics, a spin-off of World War II research into perfecting electrically heated flying suits for pilots.
Birth Control: 6 Million Years Ago, Africa and Asia
The term “birth control” was coined in 1914 by Irish-American nurse Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children herself, who is regarded as the “mother of planned parenthood.” But the concept is ancient, practiced in early societies, and it arose out of an astonishing biological change that occurred in the female reproductive cycle some six million years ago.
The change involved estrus, or heat. At that time, females, in the lineage that would become Homo sapiens, began to switch from being sexually receptive to males only during limited periods of estrus to continuous arousal and receptivity. Thus, from conceiving young only during a brief season (nature’s own birth control), the female evolved to bearing young year round.
Anthropologist
s theorize this development went hand in hand with the emerging trait of walking erect. To achieve balance for upright posture, the pelvic canal narrowed; this meant difficult and often fatal pregnancies. Natural selection began to favor females with a proclivity for giving premature birth—that is, for having babies small enough to negotiate the narrowed canal. These premature babies required longer postnatal care and consequently kept their mothers busier. Thus, the female became increasingly dependent on the male for food and protection. And she guaranteed herself and her offspring these necessities by offering the male in return sexual favors for longer and longer periods of time. Those females with only limited periods of estrus gradually died off. Soon entire generations carried the gene for continuous sexual arousal and receptivity. And with this development came the notion of controlling unwanted conception.
For tens of thousands of years, the only contraceptive method was coitus interruptus, in which the man withdraws to ejaculate outside the woman’s body: the biblical sin of Onan. With the emergence of writing about 5,500 years ago, a record of birth control methods—from the bizarre to the practical—entered history.
Every culture sought its own foolproof method to prevent conception. In ancient China, women were advised to swallow quicksilver (mercury) heated in oil. It may well have worked, since mercury is highly toxic and probably poisoned the fetus—and to a lesser extent, the mother.
A less harmful procedure was practiced by Egyptian women. Before intercourse, a woman was advised to insert a mixture of crocodile dung and honey into her vagina. While the viscous honey might have served as a temporary obstacle to impede sperm from colliding with an egg, it is more likely that the salient ingredient was dung: its sharp acidity could alter the pH environment necessary for conception to occur, killing the sperm. In effect, it was history’s first spermicide.
Egyptian birth control methods are the oldest on record. The Petri Papyrus, written about 1850 B.C., and the Eber Papyrus, composed three hundred years later, describe numerous methods to avert pregnancy. For the man, in addition to coitus interruptus there was coitus obstructus, which is full intercourse, with the ejaculate forced into the bladder through the depression of the base of the urethra. (The papryi also contain an early mention of how women handled menstruation: Egyptian women used a homemade tampon-shaped device composed of shredded linen and crushed acacia branch powder, later known as gum arabic, an emulsion stabilizer used in paints, candy, and medicine.)
Contraceptive methods assumed additional importance in the free-spirited Rome of the second and third centuries A.D. Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek gynecologist practicing in Rome, clearly understood the difference between contraceptives, which prevent conception from occurring, and abortifacients, which eject the egg after it’s fertilized. And he taught (correctly, though dangerously) that permanent female sterility could be achieved through repeated abortions. He also advised (incorrectly) that immediately following intercourse, women cough, jump, and sneeze to expel sperm; and he hypothesized infertile or “safe” days in the menstrual cycle.
Spermicides were a popular birth control method in the Near and Middle East. In ancient Persia, women soaked natural sea sponges in a variety of liquids believed to kill sperm—alcohol, iodine, quinine, and carbolic acid—and inserted them into the vagina before intercourse. Syrian sponges, from local waters, were highly prized for their absorptivity, and perfumed vinegar water, highly acidic, was a preferred spermicide.
In the ancient world, physical, as opposed to chemical, means of birth control were also available:
Cervical Cap. From about the sixth century B.C., physicians, invariably males, conceived of countless cap-like devices for the female to insert over the opening of the cervix. Greek doctors advised women to scoop out the seeds of a pomegranate half to obtain a sperm-blocking cap. Centuries later, Casanova—the Italian gambler, celebrated lover, and director of the French state lotteries, who told all in his twelve-volume memoirs—presented his mistresses with partially squeezed lemon halves. The lemon shell acted as a physical barrier, and its juice as an acidic spermicide.
A highly effective cervical cap appeared in Germany in 1870. Designed by the anatomist and physician Wilhelm Mensinga, the cap was a hollow rubber hemisphere with a watch spring around the head to secure it in place. Known as the “occlusive pessary,” or popularly as the “Dutch cap,” it was supposed to be 98 percent effective—as good as today’s diaphragms.
IUD. The scant documentation of the origin of intrauterine devices is attributable to their mysterious function in preventing conception. It is known that during the Middle Ages, Arabs used IUDs to thwart conception in camels during extended desert journeys. Using a hollow tube, an Arab herder slid a small stone into a camel’s uterus. Astonishingly, not until the late 1970s did doctors begin to understand how an IUD works. The foreign object, metal or plastic today, is treated as an invader in the uterus and attacked by the body’s white blood cells. Part of the white cells’ arsenal of weapons is the antiviral compound interferon. It’s believed that interferon kills sperm, preventing conception.
The Arab practice with camels led to a wide variety of foreign objects being inserted into animal and human uteruses: beads of glass and ebony, metals, buttons, horsehair, and spools of silver threads, to mention a few. However, the first truly effective metal-coil IUD was the “silver loop,” designed in 1928 by the German physician Ernst Frafenberg. Measuring about three fifths of an inch in diameter, the loop had adequate elasticity, though as with many later IUDs, some women developed pelvic inflammation.
Throughout history, there were physicians in all cultures who advised women to douche immediately after intercourse, believing this alone was an effective contraceptive measure. But modern research has shown that within ten seconds after the male ejaculates, some sperm may already have swum from the vaginal canal into the cervix, where douching is ineffective.
From crocodile dung to douching, all ancient contraceptive methods were largely hit or miss, with the onus of preventing conception falling upon the female. Then, in the sixteenth century, an effective means of male contraception arose: the condom.
Condom: 16th and 17th Centuries, Italy and England
Prior to the sixteenth century, did no physician think of simply placing a sheath over the penis during intercourse?
It must be stated that sheaths in earlier times were thick. They interfered with a man’s pleasure. And most doctors were men. Thus, sheaths were seldom recommended or used. That may be overstating the case, but only slightly. Penile sheaths did exist. There is evidence that the Romans, and possibly the Egyptians, used oiled animal bladders and lengths of intestine as sheaths. However, their purpose was not primarily to prevent the woman from becoming pregnant but to protect the man against catching venereal disease. When it came to birth control, men preferred to let women take the lead.
Italian anatomist Gabriel Fallopius, the sixteenth-century physician who first described the two slender tubes that carry ova from the ovaries to the uterus, is generally regarded as the “father of the condom” —an anachronistic title since Dr. Condom would not make his contribution to the device for another hundred years.
In the mid-1500s, Fallopius, a professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, designed a medicated linen sheath that fit over the glans, or tip of the penis, and was secured by the foreskin. It represents the first clearly documented prophylactic for the male member. Soon sheaths appeared for circumcised men. They were a standard eight inches long and tied securely at the base with a pink ribbon, presumably to appeal to the female. Fallopius’s invention was tested on over one thousand men, “with complete success,” as the doctor himself reported. The euphemism of the day labeled them “overcoats.”
Fallopius initially conceived of the sheath not as a contraceptive device but as a means of combating venereal disease, which then was on an epidemic rise. It is from this sixteenth-century European outbreak that sailors to the New World are believed to have in
troduced the Treponema pallidum bacterium of syphilis to native Indians.
Penile sheaths in the sixteenth century were dullingly thick, made from animal gut and fish membranes in addition to linen. Since they interfered with the pleasure of intercourse and only occasionally prevented disease—being improperly used, and reused unwashed—they were unpopular with men and regarded with derision. A French marquis sarcastically summed up the situation when he called a cattle-intestine sheath he’d tried “armor against love, gossamer against infection.”
How did Fallopius’s overcoats get to be named condoms?
Legend has it that the word derives from the earl of Condom, the knighted personal physician to England’s King Charles II in the mid-1600s. Charles’s pleasure-loving nature was notorious. He had countless mistresses, including the most renowned actress of the period, Nell Gwyn, and though he sired no legitimate heirs, he produced innumerable bastards throughout the realm.
Dr. Condom was requested to produce, not a foolproof method of contraception, but a means of protecting the king from syphilis. His solution was a sheath of stretched and oiled intestine of sheep. (It is not known if he was aware of Fallopius’s invention of a hundred years earlier. It is part of condom lore that throughout the doctor’s life, he discouraged the use of his name to describe the invention.) Condom’s sheath caught the attention of noblemen at court, who adopted the prophylactics, also against venereal disease.
The fact that sexually transmitted disease was feared far more than siring illegitimate children can be seen in several dictionary definitions of condoms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, for instance, published in London in 1785, defines a condom as “the dried gut of a sheep, worn by men in the act of coition, to prevent venereal infection.” The entry runs for several additional sentences, with no mention of contraception.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 44
